‘What They Need is Management’: American NGOs,the Second Seven Year Plan and Economic Development in Iran, 1954–1963

Following the August 1953 coup d'etat, the government of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi in Iran embarked upon an economic development program. While financial backing for the program came from the Anglo-American oil companies running Iran's oil industry, Iran's semi-independent Plan Organization and its administrator Abu'l-?asan Ebtehāj turned to American non-governmental organizations for administrative expertise, in order to turn Iran's oil power into economic improvements and a basis for the regime's lasting stability. The work of these organizations was hampered by internal disagreements and divisions, discontent among Iranians over the foreign infiltration of their development program, and skepticism from the US government regarding the capacity of Iran to accomplish an integrated development effort on such a scale. Such feelings were influenced by cultural prejudices and perceptions of Iranians as corrupt and incompetent. Ultimately American non-government organizations were pushed out by the shah who seized control over Iran's development during the 1963 White Revolution. The course of Iran's Second Seven Year Plan illustrate how Western technical and administrative ‘know-how’ were tied to the efforts harnessing new oil wealth, and how the relationship between American and Iranian developmentalists was undone by politics, prejudice and opposing view of how progress could come from petroleum.     

Incentives for the Iranian Chemical Boom: A Strategic Motivation or Applied Needs?

Iran's scientific impact has suffered hard from decades of imposed and self‐elected isolation from Western influences and international collaboration. Lately, however, the world has witnessed a remarkable increase in scientific publications from Iranian scientists in fields like nanotechnology; material science; and, perhaps most pronounced, chemistry. In this article, the factors behind this “publication boom” are discussed and examined together with an analysis of the coherence between the country's long‐term research strategies and short‐term needs in relation to present organic chemical research conducted at various Iranian universities and institutes. Organic chemistry is a keystone in important Iranian industrial sectors like the petroleum and agricultural industries, and also in the growing field of life science and pharmacology. The development of the petroleum industry and further refinement of raw oil into value‐added fine chemicals holds a key position in the reinforcement of the Iranian economy and labor market, thus motivating a governmental investment in chemical science and research. Taking an approach to find a reasonable balance with the impact from Western and Far Eastern scientific communities, Iran's own scientific roots and Islamic ideology could well be the success factor in becoming a worthy player on the international scientific arena.     

Nuclear proliferation: The Islamic Republic of Iran

Since the mid-1980s, Israel, thGawdat Bahgate United States, and other Western powers have accused Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons capability. Iranian officials have categorically denied these accusations and claimed that their nuclear program is designed for civilian purposes. This essay examines the history of Iran's nuclear program since the late 1950s and analyzes the forces that shape the country's nuclear policy. These forces include perception of security threats from Pakistan, Iraq, Israel, and the United States; domestic economic and political dynamics; and national pride. The following section will discuss the European and Russian stance on Iran's nuclear ambition as well as the International Atomic Energy Agency's efforts to reach a compromise that would satisfy the international community's concerns and Tehran's demands. The essay concludes with some predictions on how Iran's nuclear program is likely to evolve in the next few decades.     

Promoting the Advancement of Women: Baha'i Schools for Girls in Iran, 1909–35

In the early twentieth century, Iranian Baha'is were at the forefront of efforts to promote modern schooling for girls in Iran. Using previously untapped published primary sources and archival records, this article examines the history of the Baha'i schools for girls in the context of modern schooling of Iranian girls and assesses their contribution to female education in Iran. This contribution was significant and all the more remarkable considering the Iranian Baha'is’ numbers and resources and the restrictions under which they operated. Most notably, in the spring of 1933, less than two years before the forced closure of Baha'i schools by the Pahlavi state, 4 percent of all females in Iran's accredited schools were enrolled in Baha'i schools. The Baha'i community's most prestigious school, Tarbīyat-i banāt in Tehran, was by this time Iran's largest girls’ school. Outside Tehran, in some localities, the only girls’ schools were run by Baha'is, and in others a significant portion of all female pupils were enrolled in Baha'i schools.     

Iran's policy towards the Houthis in Yemen: a limited return on a modest investment

For years, mounting instability had led many to predict the imminent collapse of Yemen. These forecasts became reality in 2014 as the country spiralled into civil war. The conflict pits an alliance of the Houthis, a northern socio‐political movement that had been fighting the central government since 2004, alongside troops loyal to a former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, against supporters and allies of the government overthrown by the Houthis in early 2015. The war became regionalized in March 2015 when a Saudi Arabia‐led coalition of ten mostly Arab states launched a campaign of air strikes against the Houthis. According to Saudi Arabia, the Houthis are an Iranian proxy; they therefore frame the war as an effort to counter Iranian influence. This article will argue, however, that the Houthis are not Iranian proxies; Tehran's influence in Yemen is marginal. Iran's support for the Houthis has increased in recent years, but it remains low and is far from enough to significantly impact the balance of internal forces in Yemen. Looking ahead, it is unlikely that Iran will emerge as an important player in Yemeni affairs. Iran's interests in Yemen are limited, while the constraints on its ability to project power in the country are unlikely to be lifted. Tehran saw with the rise of the Houthis a low cost opportunity to gain some leverage in Yemen. It is unwilling, however, to invest larger amounts of resources. There is, as a result, only limited potential for Iran to further penetrate Yemen.     

Iran's ISIS policy

This article assesses Iran's strategy in dealing with the threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). It examines the implications of the rise of ISIS in Iran's immediate neighbourhood for Tehran's policies in Syria and Iraq and investigates how each of these countries affects Iranian national interests. It provides an overview of the major events marking Iran and Iraq's relations in the past few decades and discusses the strategic importance of Iraq for Iran, by looking at the two countries' energy, economic and religious ties. It also considers Iran's involvement in Syria since the beginning of the Syrian conflict. The article sheds light on the unilateral action taken by Tehran to counter ISIS, the adjustments it may have to make to its involvement in Syria, and the potential areas for tactical cooperation between Iran and the United States, as well as other key regional states such as Saudi Arabia. The article investigates three likely scenarios affecting the developments in Iraq and Iran's possible response to them as the events in the Middle East unfold.     

Iran as a ‘pariah’ nuclear aspirant

This article demonstrates that Iran conforms to Richard K. Betts' model of a ‘pariah’ nuclear aspirant, as its nuclear program is driven by a potent combination of security, normative and domestic political motivations. The regime's commitment to its nuclear program is influenced by Iran's long-standing sense of vulnerability to both regional and international adversaries, and an enduring sense of national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers, in parallel with a powerful belief in the superiority of Persian civilisation. This has resulted in the development of a narrative of ‘hyper-independence’ in Iran's foreign policy that simultaneously rejects political, cultural or economic dependence and emphasises ‘self-reliance’. The presumed security benefits that a nuclear weapons option provides are seen as ensuring Iranian ‘self-reliance’ and ‘independence’. This suggests that current strategies that focus exclusively on Iran's security motivations or on a heightened regime of sanctions are fundamentally flawed, as they fail to recognise the mutually reinforcing dynamic between Iran's security and normative/status-derived nuclear motivations.     

Nuclear Iran is Not an Option: A new negotiating strategy to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons

The negotiations between Iran and the P5+1¹ over Tehran's nuclear enrichment activities have not only failed to reach an agreement but have brought Iran much closer to the threshold of mastering the technology to produce nuclear weapons. There are many factors that precipitated this breakdown, including the West's inability to understand and deal with the Iranian psychological disposition, the failure to present to Iran the severity of the punitive measures that could be inflicted as a consequence of their defiance, and the US administration's misleading policy that gave Iran the room to maneuver. There is an urgent need to adopt a distinctively new strategy toward Iran consisting of three tracks of separate but interconnected negotiations: The first should focus on the current negotiations on Iran's enrichment program and the economic incentive package; the second should concentrate on regional security and the consequences of continued Iranian defiance; and the third track should address Iran's and the United States' grievances against each other. The United States must initiate all three tracks without which future talks will be as elusive as the previous negotiations, except this time the West and Israel will be facing the unsettling prospect of a nuclear Iran.     

Cultural Engineering Under Authoritarian Regimes: Islamization of Universities in Postrevolutionary Iran

The purpose of this article is to analyze the efforts that have been made to Islamize Iranian universities, specifically since the emergence of hardliners in 2005. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Islamic regime relentlessly intensified its efforts to Islamize universities to train a new generation of ideologically driven students. In the three decades following the Revolution, three major periods of university Islamization have been implemented. The Cultural Revolution, which started in 1980, was the first step in the Islamization of Iran's universities: to cleanse the higher education systems from students and professors who criticized the new established Islamic regime. By increasing the number of students and the development of universities throughout Iran in the Rafasanjai era, the second wave of the Islamization of the university was triggered by Ayatollah Khamenei in 1994. During the reform era, the Islamization of universities slowed because of the many confrontations between the Supreme Leader and the reformist administrations. With the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential election, the Islamization of universities intensified. While there are a few publications about the Islamization of universities, they mainly focused on the first and second decades following the 1979 Revolution. Focusing on the third period, this article will investigate the different strategies and tactics for the Islamization of universities, as well as reasons for its failures.     

The Shah's détente with Khrushchev: Iran's 1962 missile base pledge to the Soviet Union

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran is commonly portrayed in Cold War historiography as a loyal client of the United States. Yet, the shah also pursued détente with Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, culminating in Iran's September 1962 pledge to the Soviet Union that no foreign missile bases would be permitted on Iranian territory. Drawing on American and British documentary sources, as well as the memoirs of several Iranian participants, this article suggests that the shah's 1962 pledge was not simply a ploy to leverage more arms from the United States. Rather, it represented the shah's first modest step towards a more independent foreign policy during the Cold War.     

Iranian Membership in the World Trade Organization: An Unclear Future

Iran is the largest economy that is not currently included in the World Trade Organization (WTO). This paper addresses why Iran has not yet joined the WTO and whether it is ready to join. Iran's interaction with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1948 marks the beginning of the relationship between Iran and the WTO. To determine why Iran has not yet entered the WTO, the role and penetration of powerful members of the WTO and Iran's economic position are examined. To determine whether Iran is ready to join the WTO, literature is reviewed concerning the effects of joining for the five most-affected major industries in Iran. The major disadvantages of joining the WTO are described as short-term effects, and the advantages of joining are described as long-term goals. Currently, no clear scheme has been offered to handle the negative effects on the Iranian economy. As the major player, the Iranian government could achieve the long-term goals with a realistic and well-planned strategy or miss the mark through its inattention to the critical economic effects.     

Iran's Free Trade Zones: Back Doors to the International Economy?

Since the late 1980s, Iran has pursued a policy of attracting foreign investment and fostering regional trade by granting favored status to the so-called “Free Trade-Industrial Zones” (FTZs) and “Special Economic Zones” (SEZs). To date six FTZs and sixteen SEZs have been set up throughout Iran. The FTZs are strategically positioned for their potential international links and have their eyes on markets beyond Iran, and the SEZs for their value in serving main industries and for improving the country's distribution system and supply network. This paper examines the experience of these zones in Iran in the context of Iran's contradictory and ambivalent approach to international economic integration in general. It is shown that liberal policies pursued in the free zones have been in marked contrast to the approach in the mainland, which has been generally inward-looking in much of the post-revolutionary period. We examine first the rise of free zones as a global phenomenon followed by an overview of Iran's zones and their characteristics. It is argued that serving mainly as “back doors” to the international economy, Iran's free zones have stalled mainly because their promotion has been decoupled from, if not at odds with, official attitudes to the international economy at large. As a result, the zones' ability to attract investment has been limited by both adverse external perceptions of Iran as an investment destination and internal complexities discouraging such investment.     

Stones from Bavaria: Iranian Lithography in its Global Contexts

This essay traces the circulation of the industrial commodities of lithographic presses and stones and compares the uses to which these commodities were put in Iran with other regions at the same time. Using Persian travelogues as sources on scientific exchange, the essay compares Iran's access to lithography with its spread through Europe, Russia and South and Southeast Asia. Using lithography as a gauge of Iran's integration into an industrializing global economy, it compares state-led Iranian attempts to access lithographic commodities with attempts by other regional powers to develop local sources for these ‘stones from Bavaria’. After tracing the role of Christian Evangelicalism in the technology's dissemination, the essay finally contextualizes Iranian uses of lithography in global developments in illustrated and newspaper printing.

Since the art of Lithography has risen to considerable celebrity, attempts have been made to discover the same species of stone…

– Aloys Senefelder, 1819

     

Iran and the United States: Reconcilable Differences?

Hostility between Iran and the United States has intensified since the mid-2000s. America's allegations regarding Iran's nuclear program and its association with terrorist organizations are the main drive for this rising tension. This study focuses on the latter. Specifically, it examines Tehran's ties to militant groups in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in the Palestinian Territories. I argue that although American and Iranian interests in the region are very different, they are not necessarily mutually exclusive.     

Tobacco,Eurasian Trade,and the Early Modern Iranian Economy

This article focuses on the development of the tobacco industry in Iran during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It uses this discussion as an entry point to inquire about the early modern Iranian economy. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it makes several historiographical interventions. In explaining what the development of a completely new agrarian industry means in Iranian society, the paper suggests that innovation and intensification may not have been completely absent in agriculture and that in contrast to the way some of the available literature tends to argue, the Iranian economy may not have experienced continuous decline in all sectors throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, this article contends that the tobacco industry helped bring about the rise of merchants and landowners in Iranian society, and with that the further development of mass consumption and ever-increasing cycles of production and accumulation that expanded the commercialization of agriculture, domestic and international trade networks, and Iran's agrarian economy.     

Towards an Anti-Western Stance: The Economic Discourse of Iran's 1979 Revolution

The Iranian Revolution of 1979 saw the mobilization and cooperation of a variety of groupings that were brought together by their shared determination to overthrow the Shah. However, it was not only opposition to the Pahlavi regime, but also suspicion of and disdain for that regime's Western backers that united these revolutionary groups. Religious leaders (ulama), merchants (bazaaris), intellectuals and students alike all espoused the strong anti-Western sentiments that had been developing in Iran over the previous two decades. But what particular factors can be seen to have encouraged the adoption of these sentiments in the lead-up to the revolution, and in what ways were they articulated and subsequently put into practice by the leaders of the new regime? This article suggests that various domestic and international influences can be seen to have shaped the emergence of Iran's revolutionary discourse of “economic independence.” In particular, the paper argues that a peculiar blend of Shi'i concepts of social justice and Marxist-Leninist discourses of class struggle and anti-imperialism not only informed the economic outlook of Iran's burgeoning revolutionary movement during the period 1953–79, but was also enshrined in the Constitution of the Islamic Republic.     

Geographies of precarity and violence in the Kurdish kolberi underground economy

This paper investigates the precarious lives of the Kurdish kolbers, underground laborers who transport cargo on their backs across Iran's border with Iraq. Throughout their arduous journeys, kolbers experience various forms of violence, including direct shooting by border guards. Findings from interviews with the kolbers indicate that kolberi, a strenuous, dangerous, precarious type of labor, is a response to pervasive unemployment in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhelat), and a long-term consequence of the Iranian state's systematic economic disinvestment in the Kurdish region. Although kolbers assert agency within their labor at localized scales, the social organization of kolberi is a reaction to the Iranian state's biopolitical strategies of economic disinvestment and violence. Drawing on a biopolitical framework, we illustrate the analytical interconnections among the economic marginalization of Rojhelat, violence against the kolbers, and the kolbers' precarious lives. The article offers ideas for future research that come out of our examination of the complexities of kolberi—an examination that demonstrates the importance of incorporating political-economic, ethno-territorial, and biopolitical factors in analyses of underground border exchanges and precarious marginalized lives.     

European Union Constructive Engagement with Iran (2000–2004): An Exercise in Conditional Human Rights Diplomacy

In 2002, the European Union (EU) announced that it would enter a Trade and Cooperation Agreement with Iran. The deepening of economic and diplomatic relations between the EU and Iran was, however, linked by the Commission to progress in four areas: human rights, non-proliferation, terrorism and the Middle East Peace Process. This article argues that the current focus on efforts to find a solution to Iran's nuclear ambitions has overshadowed the dynamics of EU human rights diplomacy towards that country. Unlike diplomatic pressure on the non-proliferation issue, the EU-Iran Human Rights Dialogue did not only enjoy great support by politicians and human rights activists, but did indeed result in changes in legislation and policies aimed at the protection of human rights. Europe's multi-track strategy allowed Iranian activists and members of the legal profession to approach the notion of human rights from within the Shi'a notion of justice and rationality and thus managed to assert Islamic roots for human rights and uncovered the very secular realities of human rights violations in the Islamic Republic. The Dialogue was launched at a critical juncture in Iran's reformist movement and helped likeminded politicians, particularly the executive and parliament, to gain momentum domestically and credibility internationally. While efforts at reform were and still are often impeded by the country's competing centers of power, this article argues that efforts to promote and protect human rights in Iran must not be sacrificed for concerns over the nuclear issue.     

When leadership traits meet historic success: Hassan Rouhani and the nuclear deal of 2015

This study aims to show how dispositional characters of political leaders are affected by situational developments during the time‐in‐office. Although newly emerging literature of leadership traits demonstrate that significant events alter leaders’ traits, they mainly focus on the measurement of shocking events on dispositional features, leaving the effect of achievements underexplored. The Iranian nuclear deal of 2015 is one of the most significant successes in the last decade of world politics. Gambling his political career on nuclear talks by promising the Iranian people to solve Iran's decades‐long isolation, President Hassan Rouhani played a momentous role in negotiating the deal. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was globally recognized as a success of Rouhani's leadership. Using the Leadership Trait Analysis (LTA), this article will show the role of Rouhani's personality in the realization of the historic nuclear deal and measure the effect of such a success on Rouhani's leadership traits.     

Quietness beyond Political Power: Politics of Taking Sanctuary (Bast Neshini) in the Shi‘ite Shrines of Iran

“The politic” and “the religious” have had many relations with each other in Iranian history and in some cases “the religious” has been defined in a situation beyond the extent of the political power. A case in point is the right of taking sanctuary in Shi‘ite shrines. Throughout Iran's history, subjects could take refuge in Shi‘ite shrines and some other places related to religious and non-religious authorities. Persecution was delayed or the individual was forgiven, though sometimes they were sentenced when exiting the shrine. By referring to religious texts that have reinforced that tradition, this article seeks to trace continuities between early Islam and modern Iran. It focuses on sanctuary taking and sit-ins at shrines and tombs, and on the interplay between those actions and political power, and discusses the changing mobility and dynamisms of those actions at different periods of Iranian history.